Patrick Cockburn discusses Iraq’s increasingly desperate economic outlook as oil prices remain at historic lows. Iraq’s economy, like many of those in the Middle East, is hugely reliant on oil, with millions directly on a government payroll that depends almost entirely on the oil market in order to remain solvent. Worsening conditions could endanger an already fraught political environment in a country that continues to battle the remnants of an ISIS insurgency in the western part of the country.

Discussed on the show:

“Iraq will be hit harder by the oil price drop than by coronavirus or Isis” (Independent)

Patrick Cockburn is the Middle East correspondent for The Independent and the author of The Age of Jihad and Chaos & Caliphate.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; Listen and Think Audio; TheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com.

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The following is an automatically generated transcript.

Show TranscriptScott Horton 0:10

All right, y'all welcome it's Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I've recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. All right, guys on the line, I've got the great Patrick Cockburn from the independent independent co.uk and the author of a bunch of great books including the age of jihad. Welcome back to the show, sir. How are you doing?

Patrick Cockburn 0:53

Great. Good to be back.

Scott Horton 0:55

Good. Good to talk to you. As always, Patrick. Very important article. hear about Iraq. Iraq will be hit harder by the oil price drop than by Coronavirus or ISIS. And so yeah, it sure is because of the lockdown worldwide here. The demand for oil has just fallen completely through the floor and for a country like Iraq, they're just about entirely dependent on oil revenue to make everything go there, aren't they?

Patrick Cockburn 1:28

Yeah, I mean, it's, there's really nothing else you go to the market, in Baghdad or anywhere else in the country. You know, you find that absolutely everything comes from elsewhere. You know, you want to buy an onion, you want to buy a watermelon, these comes from Iran or turkey or anything more sophisticated, you know, it's sort of clothing, Turkey, you know, or from China or somewhere like that. There's almost nothing produced locally. So we've got about 90% dependent on oil revenues. But I think what's interesting also that this is in Iraq, this is, you know, it's it's dependent, but actually all the oil producers all the same, you know, Saudi Arabia, although they, they say that try to develop or have been trying to develop other economic activities, that completely dependent on oil. So if we're looking at a long term collapse in the oil price, we've had collapses before, but nothing as radical as this unlikely to be as long as this, you know, this, we were I think we're seeing I started change that in the 1970s we have the rise of the oil superpowers, you know, Saudi Arabia and the others, and that's going to go into reverse.

Scott Horton 2:40

Yeah. Well, that really could lead to massive instability, as you said, not just in Iraq, but throughout the entire Gulf region, right.

Patrick Cockburn 2:50

Yeah, cuz these are states, you know, in some ways that different Iraq, Saudi Arabia,